14 DAY TRIAL // At the end of May, Gigabyte has announced the introduction of a special version of the Z68XP-UD3 motherboard which came bundled with an Intel mSATA 311-series SSD, and today the company let us know that the board has arrived in retail.
Intel's 20GB 311-series Larson Creek solid state drive was specially designed to be used in conjunction with the Z68 chipset and the Smart Response technology, as a fast cache for the hard drive.
Thanks to the SLC NAND Flash used, the SSD manages to achieve some impressive performance figures and can significantly improve the speed of the system.
Moving to the motherboard itself, this is Gigabyte's most advanced LGA 1155 solution to feature a mSATA slot and also packs a pair of PCI Express x16 slots, which drop to an x8 mode when both are populated.
These are accompanied by three PCI-E x1 slots and two legacy PCI slots, while storage is provided by eight SATA ports. Four of these work at 6Gbps speeds.
On the back of the Z68XP-UD3, we find that Gigabyte has installed a PS/2 port, eight USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a FireWire port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out and an HDMI video output.
“We are proud to deliver the world's first motherboard equipped with an Intel 311 Series SSD,” said Richard Chen, VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Gigabyte.
“The Z68XP-UD3 iSSD is the easiest way for our customers to take advantage of the performance provided by the Intel Smart Response technology,” concluded the company's rep.
Together with this announcement, the motherboard also made its appearance in European comparison engines with prices starting at 210 Euros. Considering that just the 20GB 311 Series SSD is priced at $110 US, this sounds like a pretty OK deal. (via HardwareLuxx)